Spiffy:

Iffy:

Fall 2008 seems light years away.

We sat down in a darkened conference room in EA's lovely Redwood Shores campus and immediately knew that we were in for a treat. "The primary theme of Dead Space is dismemberment," stated Executive Producer Glen Schofield in a remarkably understated manner... as opposed to his next comment. "We want to make this the scariest game ever." From the tiny taste of Dead Space we got, we can honestly say that it looks like EA's Redwood Shores Studios is well on its way to producing exactly that.

Tech Tools of the Space Trade

You take on the guise of Isaac Clarke, your average, everyday engineer tasked with repairing a buggy communications array on an old deep-space mining vessel. As such, the character you play in Dead Space isn't the most adept with weaponry, but he is pretty handy with jury-rigging his innocuous engineering tools into slug-throwers of varying power and portability. Of course, you'll need every trick up Isaac's pressure-suit sleeves once the aliens attack... as they inevitably must in a horror game set in the desperate blackness of deep space.

From what we could gather, Isaac's weapons are standard fare with a few notable exceptions, including a machinegun that can split its three barrels and spin them laterally. When held over his head, Isaac can use the spinning barrels to unleash a hail of lead in 360 degrees. We watched as Isaac picked up different objects with one mysterious weapon that seemed to mimic the functionality of Half-Life 2's gravity gun. He was even able to freeze some aliens dead in their tracks by using a device to cover the creature in a glob of the same goo used to keep intergalactic travelers in cold sleep for extended journeys. Another energy cannon would actually unfurl mechanical arms from its sides in order to produce a wide-area burst of plasma that swept forward in a large wave, decimating fiendish aliens unlucky enough to be caught in its path.

One interesting trait of these weapons is that their ammo counts appear as semi-transparent illuminated numbers hovering just over the gun. This is in line with Dead Space's HUD-less design which relies more on a system of holographic projections to deliver information than on your standard helmet-bound screens. In fact, most of the information that you'll encounter in Dead Space from ammo pick-ups to communications transmissions look like they'll appear as floating holograms. The major exceptions to this rule are, of course, the alien monstrosities aching to tear your throat out through your faceplate.